In order to have the impact and punch that most modern mixes exhibit, you have to make a space in your mix for both of these instruments so they won’t fight each other and turn the mix into a muddy mess.

While simply EQing your bass high and your kick low (or the other way around), might work at it’s simplest, it’s best to have a more in-depth strategy, so to make them fit together, try the following:

1. EQ the kick drum between 60 to 120 Hz as this will allow it to be heard on smaller loudspeakers. For more attack and beater click add between 1 to 4 kHz. You may also want to dip out some of the “boxiness” that lives between 200 to 600 Hz.

EQing in the 30 to 60 Hz range will produce a kick that you can feel if your loudspeakers are large enough, but that can also make it sound thin on smaller speakers and probably won’t translate well to a variety of speaker systems. Most 22-inch kick drums like to center somewhere around 80 Hz, for instance.

2. Bring up the bass with the kick. The kick and bass should occupy slightly different frequency spaces. The kick will usually be in the 60 to 80 Hz range whereas the bass will emphasize higher frequencies anywhere from 80 to 250 Hz (although sometimes the two are reversed depending upon the song).

Before you continue to EQ at other frequencies, try filtering out any unnecessary bass frequencies (below 30 Hz on kick and 50 Hz on the bass, although it varies according to style and taste) so the kick and bass are not boomy or muddy. There should be a driving, foundational quality to the combination of these two together.

A common mistake is to emphasize the kick with either too much level or EQ and not enough on the bass guitar. This gives you the illusion that your mix is bottom light, because what you’re doing is effectively shortening the duration of the low frequency envelope in your mix.

Since the kick tends to be more transitory than the bass guitar, this gives you the idea that the low frequency content of your mix is inconsistent. For pop music, it’s best to have the kick provide the percussive nature of the bottom while the bass fills out the sustain and musical parts.

3. Make sure the snare is strong, otherwise the song will lose its drive when everything else is added in. This usually calls for at least some compression. You may need a boost at 1 kHz for attack, 120 to 240 Hz for fullness, and 10 kHz for snap. As you bring in the other drums and cymbals, you might want to dip a little of 1 kHz on these to make room for the snare.

Also make sure that the toms aren’t too boomy (if so, try rolling them off a bit below 60 Hz first before you begin to EQ elsewhere).

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